Four more years being ignored?

Democrats concluded their three-day lovefest for President Barack Obama on Thursday night. The applause sign is not blinking over Stockton. What has Obama done for Stockton?

Michael Fitzgerald

Democrats concluded their three-day lovefest for President Barack Obama on Thursday night. The applause sign is not blinking over Stockton. What has Obama done for Stockton?

For four years, Obama has neglected the San Joaquin Valley by failing to deliver help that cities such as Stockton need the most, a fix to the foreclosure crisis.

"It's like we're out in no-man's land sometimes," lamented Mayor Ann Johnston.

Uncle Sam found other ways to help Stockton. Substantial ways. But housing remains the Big Enchilada, and Obama never even popped that one into the oven.

"I would have hoped that Congress would have taken action to force the banks early on to help refinance mortgages," Johnston said. "To do whatever they could to keep people in their homes so we would not have had this wave of foreclosures."

"President Obama poured vast amounts of money into efforts to stabilize the financial system, rescue the auto industry and revive the economy," the New York Times recently wrote. "But he tried to finesse the cleanup of the housing crash. ... "

And it didn't work.

The conventional wisdom is that Obama thought these other measures would suffice to revive the economy, restoring the housing market along with it.

"The administration basically got the crisis backward," Ezra Klein opined in the Washington Post. "You couldn't fix the housing crisis by fixing the economy. You had to fix the economy by fixing the housing crisis. And the administration's housing policy wasn't anywhere near sufficient to do that."

The Obama administration could have championed debt-forgiveness legislation. After all, taxpayers bailed out the banks. Obama did not try.

The administration could have tried "cramdown" legislation, which would have allowed bankruptcy judges to cut mortgage debt. It did not try.

And when Stockton, the Valley and other regions sent Washington a "We're dyin' here!" cry for help, Obama flew over the Valley on the way to San Francisco fundraisers.

The result is ugly: Of approximately 132,400 owner-occupied housing units in San Joaquin County (as of 2006), almost half (48.7 percent) have received a notice of default, according to the Business Forecasting Center at University of the Pacific.

The number of foreclosure sales in San Joaquin County since January 2007 is 38,755. Housing and personal financial carnage half-again bigger than the entire city of Tracy.

Not that Uncle Sam entirely lost our address. Obama's stimulus package sent about $53 million for local roads. That jump-started Interstate 5 highway widening and other important road projects that might have languished for years.

The feds sent around $20 million in neighborhood stabilization money that allowed Stockton to buy several dozen foreclosures and fix them for first-time homebuyers - a drop in the bucket, but better than a dry bucket.

The Regional Transit District got $5.1 million for the Metro Express and an additional $7.95 million to centralize its scattered operations.

More importantly, the feds (prodded by Rep. Jerry McNerney) showered $34.3 million on the Port of Stockton, including $13 million to help create the Marine Highway to Oakland.

That was big. And green.

The port bought two colossal cranes and two barges, and fixed up docks to handle Port of Oakland container overflow.

Soon, the Marine Highway will take hundreds of container trucks off the Altamont every day. It will create as many as 400 jobs. It will hugely boost commerce at the port.

All in all, though, Obama has treated the San Joaquin Valley like the far side of the moon.

Rep. Dennis Cardoza, before he resigned in frustration, said, "The reality is his policies have not in any way helped the economic calamity for the Central Valley."

And Cardoza is a Democrat.

When ticking off the causes of Stockton's bankruptcy, we talk about the drop in sales tax revenues, unaffordable public employee compensation, over-spending on capital projects, state money grabs, bad bookkeeping and bad luck.

But by far the major cause was the drop in property tax revenues from the foreclosure crisis. Think of the misery that could have been spared had Obama done his job.